Life and works of Walt Whitman

#4 J.D. SALINGER

J.D. (Jerome David) Salinger was born and raised in New York City (1919). His father, Sol Salinger, was a salesman. His mother, Marie, was a homemaker. Salinger began writing stories as a teen while attending Valley Forge Military Academy. In 1936, he graduated and ended up at Columbia University in Manhattan. It was there his writing professor, who happened to be an editor at Story magazine, loved his writing so much. He had Salinger’s vignette, “The Young Folks,” published in 1940.
During World War II, Salinger began submitting his short stories to The New Yorker. After rejecting seven of his novels, in 1941, it accepted “Slight Rebellion off Madison.” Salinger’s stories center on children or teenagers. Events take place in the wealthy suburbs of New York City. Readers regularly compared his style to that of F. Scott Fitzgerald.
In the post-war years, Salinger published several more short stories in Story magazine and served as a contributing editor for the magazine between 1946 and 1947. Salinger worked almost exclusively at the New Yorker for about twenty years, leaving in the mid-1950s.
J.D. Salinger was famous for his portrayal of adolescent angst in his novel Catcher in the Rye (released in 1951). In 1965, he published the novella Hapworth 16, 1924. This is a story told from Seymour Glass’s perspective, the brother of a character from Salinger’s early work, “The Catcher in the Rye.” It was published in The New Yorker and had an illustration by Salinger himself.
In addition to the Catcher in the Rye, “Franny” (1955) and “Zooey” (1957), “Raise High the Roof Beam” (1955), “Carpenters” (1955), and “Seymour: An Introduction” (1959) are novels of Salinger’s.

#5 MARK TWAIN

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, with the pen name Mark Twain, was born in Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835. He and his family moved shortly after that to Hannibal, Missouri, where he spent most of his childhood. Twain’s childhood friends and neighbors included Henry Clay Riley, John Briggs, and Tom Blankenship, the latter two of whom later became Twain’s first publishers.
A year after his father died, he became an apprentice for a printer. He began writing articles and humorous sketches for The Hannibal Journal.
Twain was an American humorist, novelist, entrepreneur, lecturer, and travel writer. His writing style was unique and spoke to the everyday person, which made him a massive hit in his time, and it still resonates with people to this day. His wit and satire earned him praise from both his critics and peers.
Twain was a friend to many, including presidents, artists, industrialists, and European royalty. Twain gets quoted often as saying, “The two most important days in your life are the day you are born, and the day you find out why.”
He first turned to journalism for Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. He then had his first story, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” published in 1865. With this came such international attention, a French version was released.
For Mark Twain, “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” (1876) and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” (1884), also known as “the Great American Novel,” are his best-known novels. With his works translated into more than 30 languages, he has become one of the most quoted novelists of all time.